Synteettisiä huumesoluja

You know what’s a lot easier than all the high minded business about environment, or life extension, or even the scary doomsday 12 Monkeys scenarios? Growing simpler molecule drugs. I don’t mean like aspirin, I mean like heroin and cocaine, THC and hallucinogens. They already grow in plants thoroughly studied, and people are motivated and not at all risk averse about getting those sequences somewhere they can use them. Cooking meth is hard and dangerous science compared to the ability to get a starter of a minimal cell that poops heroin and feeding it growth medium in your closet. We may have lost the drug war, but not as badly as the drug lords have.

In a scenario building exercise on the future of drugs I participated in a while ago we investigated a future scenario not too unlike the one above: new technologies makes the threshold of entry to the drug market low and people are fairly accepting of drugs. The result was a "drugs-com boom" where startups invented ever more innovative drugs (starting with enhancers, moving on towards recreational drugs and continuing towards strange pharma-bio-nano-info hybrid drugs), leaving drug lords and pharmaceutical companies in the dust.--While there might be Microsoft and Apple biologies there will also be open Linux biologies - we are in a sense already living in one. And as the user interface of biology improves more people will poke at it. Just like we will never win the drug war, we will not be able to win a war against biology - synthetic or natural. Just like we have to accept that people will use drugs, we have to accept that people will try to use available tools to get what they want.